Can I have guidence for TFS 2010 for the following areas:
What is the correct use of tfs and the properties that are exposed for each backlog item and task for recording of effort so that we report on progress using the burndown charts and can assess velocity.
It is not obvious to us what is the appropriate workflow for raising questions about functionality against tasks / user stories so that the person who needs to answer them can easily find those tasks / stories that have outstanding questions. And for when the question is answered how the person(s) who need to know the answer are alerted that the answer is there. Maybe tfs is not the right place to do this and we should be manually doing this?
Unless you customized something, the report features you are asking about will light up in the reports if you use the field in the Task work item named Remaining Work - update it regularly - daily if possible.
The database most of the default reports use (Tfs_Analysis) gets updated every 2 hours by default. Some of the reports only show a daily roll-up so depending on what you are looking for you might not see changes until the day after.
As for your 2nd question about how to communicate about missing information in user stories, etc.. you should read the Process Guidance for the template that was used to create your Team Project. I'm guessing you are using the MSF Agile 5.0 template, so do a search for that and "Process Guidance." The Process Guidance is basically the instructions for how to use the TFS work items and reports, etc... It can be found online (on MSDN) or by right-clicking on your team project in Team Explorer and choosing Process Guidance from the context menu. I'm answering this from my phone but can include a link to it later if you find this helpful.
Related
I use Query Result tiles in my dashboard to help teammates on multiple projects to quickly view the work that is assigned to them. We used to be able to click on a given task to open the detailed description of said task but now it no longer works. The tile only shows the associated user story and is no longer linking to the detailed view screen.
I have checked the queries used (simple work items and direct link query that shows all tasks assigned to a given user and its associated User Story) and reviewed the latest updates to Azure Devops but I can't find any changes that could affect the expected results.
Sorry about this issue you meet. This is caused by our server. There are some mistake occurred on our side, so that the work item which displayed on dashboards could not be clickable successfully now.
You can follow this ticket which report on Developer Community.
The fixed release has been deployed now, but haven't cover all regions. It may take some time to finish that. Please wait for this fix deploy finished. And if you still have this issue recently, you can vote and comment on Develop Community.
Our product engineers are still focusing on this issue and will help you investigate more.
We have a project on VS online that uses the Agile process template. We have configured this project to
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If I create a bug, I can't unfortunately delete it afterward. The 'State' dropdown only includes the 'New', 'Closed', 'Active' and 'Resolved' values. This does not match with what Microsoft documents in the following page. If you look at the section labeled 'Q: What workflow states does Agile support?', it says that you can go from 'New' to 'Removed'.
Why I am not able to do this change? What can I do to remove bugs that were created by mistake or that were simply not valid?
Note that I am the administrator of the project.
Sorry about the confusion. The Removed state is not part of the Agile Process Template, and we will update the documentation to reflect this.
We will also fix the product moving forward to allow to remove bugs on the backlog. Keep an eye to the release notes (and subscribe to the rss feed) to learn when we have fixed it.
Ewald Hofman (TFS/VSO Program Manager)
I can get the same behavior with you, so I help you submit a feedback on Microsoft Connect website, you can track the feedback from this link:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/1986844
For now, you can delete the bug via destroywi command:
witadmin destroywi /collection:https://<your project>.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection /id:<bug ID>
I have started to use Cloud9 IDE recently and have to say I really like it as an individual. I use VS 2010 at work and TFS 2010 too. This made me think about the TFS equivalent for Cloud9. GitHub is something I have always been aware of but never really used.
I have done my research and read docs etc, what I really need some clarification in though is the whole Work Item system. I know GitHub has an Issue tracking but does it have a Work Item system similar to TFS. With the main features such as assigning work items to developers?
A little explanation to just clarify would be fantastic. Thanks!
If you're looking for a way to have Issues show up like WorkItems in your task list in visual studio, I don't think there is a solution for this to date.
You can however assign developers to issues within GitHub:
Create or Edit an Issue
Click the gear next to "No one is assigned".
Select a member from your organization to assign the issue to them.
Eric suggests that you read your team's diffs every morning. Can I get TFS to automate this in some way? Ideally I'd like an email with all of the differences in, but I'd settle for a link to each of the commits.
As someone who works for Eric and who has the behaviour of checking the diffs each morning let me explain what I do. I'd like to think that I was one of the people he was thinking about when he wrote the post, but I know for a fact that he didn't know I did the diff checking each morning :-)
In Eclipse I use the Team, Synchronize... functionality to compare my local workspace with the latest on the server. As I do a get latest frequently, this tells me what has happened since I last did this (i.e. what changed while I wasn't looking).
In Visual Studio, I can do a similar thing by right clicking on the root folder of the area that interests me and selecting Compare... and then doing a compare of the Workspace version with the latest version.
Alternatively, you can just do a "History..." on the folder that is of interest and a brief scan down the history view will show you what has been happening and you can go look at what is interesting. It also encourages you to leave good check-in comments, and to encourage your developers to do the same :-)
I used to have email alerts configured for each check-in (Team, Project Alerts...), but I just ended up ignoring them most of the time. I even have a robotic rabbit configured to talk to me when someone does a check-in or runs a build - but this is only useful during the day, not checking what has happened the previous day while I was asleep (I live in a different time-zone to the rest of my colleagues so they do a lot of work while I sleep and vice-versa, making the practise of diff-checking even more useful)
In theory it would be possible to write a program that did generate you a diff each day between the latest version and your workspace version, however I've never bothered myself. This is partly because as I find the most value of the practise comes in exploring the changes that were made each day rather than just reading about them. I also admit that I wasn't aware that anyone else in the world was doing this daily diff routine - I figured I was alone in my code voyerisum, but obviously not!
UPDATE Feb 12, 2009: The following blog post just came to my attention.
http://blogs.msdn.com/abhinaba/archive/2008/07/07/auto-generating-code-review-email-for-tfs.aspx
It talks about (and provides source for) a tool called CRMail that will generate an email from a shelveset that will contain links back to Team System Web Access to show the diffs for each change in the changeset. It would be possible to modify this source to get it to show you diffs between changesets if you wanted to. Then you would just need to hook it up to run either as a nightly scheduled task or on every check-in by subscribing to the check-in event from TFS.
Have you explored setting up a report on the project portal that would show diffs based on date? I haven't done this (and I'm at home now so I can't investigate it), but I know that there is a lot of information you can get out of the portal. Whether you can get code diffs, I don't know.
The other alternative would be automating something with tfsadmin or the power tools. Again, not at work so I can't look at it, though the power tools seem like they may make it possible to do what you want from the docs.
A quick solution would be to configure project alerts to send you one email per changeset.
Filter these into a separate folder in your email client, and review them at your leisure.
I have a set of work items that are completed and I am ready to move their changes to our production branch. Is it possible to find the changesets that are attached to them and selectively merge them with the target branch?
Not easily is the short answer.
Currently there is no real link between work items and code promotion. You can associate a changeset with a work item on check-in (or indeed at any time), but that is about as far as things go.
Basically you would have to do this by hand using the provided UI in Visual Studio (i.e. look up the work items, get the changeset ID's and then do (possibly several) merges by selecting the appropriate changeset ranges. If this is a regular way of working then you could write a program in .NET that used the Microsoft TFS API to talk to the work item tracking component to get the changesets required and then either did the merges programatically or kicked off the command line client (tf) to bring up appropriate UI for the merges.
Sorry it's not a more helpful answer. I know that the team at Microsoft have heard this scenario a few times now however I've not heard of any plans to have it better supported "out the box" in the current or the next release of TFS. That said, there are a lot of improvements to the branching ad merging stuff in TFS2010 so it is possible that something is/will be in there that might help you. It may be worth you logging some feedback on http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio for this feature if it is important to you.
Good luck,
Martin.